


Endothermic Animal

by thousandsofyears



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: (kind of), Captivity, Despair, Non-Consensual Penetration, Other, Oviposition, Purging, Vomiting, Xenobiology, alien hive-beasts that use other creatures as egg incubators, hurt/some comfort, no actual sex is going on here, portal ford, xenobestiality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 21:47:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21645970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thousandsofyears/pseuds/thousandsofyears
Summary: Stanford Pines, 35-year-old human in exile, is starting to believe he would have rather taken his chances with the bounty hunters.
Kudos: 29





	Endothermic Animal

He _had_ been warned about these creatures.

It was just chance and a randomly occurring shifting-point that had brought him to the town of Arbel, but he’d considered himself lucky. The inhabitants—a vaguely reptiloid species called the veum—were friendly, if not particularly advanced, and they had never heard of Bill Cipher. The rip in space that sometimes dropped aliens on them was not frequent or well-understood enough for this to have turned into a hub of interdimensional activity, unlike some of the cities Ford had been to. A young adult called Faelta who worked at the inn had been more than willing to tell him about the town in exchange for some news about the multiverse, and Ford had gladly obliged while checking in to spend the night.

While paying, Ford’s hand had touched Faelta’s for a moment, and the contact made the veum tilt their mouth in a way that probably meant surprise. “You’re endothermic?”

“My biology does regulate body temperature automatically, yes,” Ford said carefully. “What of it?”

“It’s unusual for an intelligent species.” Faelta flipped their four-fingered scaly hands back and forth; a gesture Ford couldn’t quite interpret. “You probably shouldn’t leave town for at least a few weeks. It’s breeding season for the hraugn, and—well, you know.”

“Hraugn?” Ford had never heard of them. “A dangerous animal?”

“Not—well, they’re not usually dangerous to _people_. I mean, to veum, like us. They’re herbivores, and as long as you don’t disturb their hives, they’re mostly harmless beasts. But they—” Faelta scrunched their face. “—Well, hraugn use endothermic animals to put their eggs in. It’s pretty nasty. I don’t think they’d make much of a difference between you and a cobo or a narwin, so—yeah. Just stay in town, okay?”

Ford had he’d been too tired at that point to be ask for details, and after a rare full night’s sleep it didn’t seem to be a priority. He wasn’t planning on leaving town to explore this particular alien forest anytime soon, anyway.

What he did hope to do was to rest here for at least a week or two. Catch up on sleep. Store up on food and other provisions. Maybe replace his old coat—he’d mended it a couple of times, but it was fraying at the cuffs and starting to wear thin in places.

But that was no to be, since apparently his last journey had been tracked by at least one team of bounty hunters. He was lucky enough to find out about them before they saw him—they were gharlottans, even bulkier than most of that species and obviously armed to the teeth—but his chances of hiding from them in town were abysmal. He hardly knew anyone there well enough to ask them to put themselves at risk for him, and being the only other non-native in the area made him stand out like a sore thumb.

Taking his chances with wild animals seemed like a better bet than confronting three professionals, all far bigger and better armed than he was.

They’d be searching—he knew they’d learn that he’d left town soon enough—but he wasn’t going to make it easy for them He’d learned a few things about covering his tracks in the wilderness in the past few years, and his best bet was going to be to stay hidden—from bounty hunters and wild animals alike—until he could be sure that the hunters had left, or until he could locate and utilize a new dimensional shifting-point.

No real rest, no new provisions, certainly no new coat. There was no helping that.

He found a large tree with thick yellow-brown foliage, which would do adequately as a nest. Climbing the rough bark, he seated himself on one of the larger branches—a comfortable three feet in diameter, at least—with his back against the trunk. The foliage would hide him from spying eyes, even from above, while he had a decent view of what went on below him. It was hardly perfect, but it was a far more defendable position than most alternatives he could think of. He kept his stolen handgun—well, a small raygun, holding exactly eight charges—at the ready and tried to be prepared for anything.

* * *

It takes no more than half an hour before he’s attacked by hraugn.

There is no mistaking them. He doesn’t know whether they tracked him by scent, or perhaps by body heat, but when they come swarming up the tree like overlarge ants, they certainly seem to know exactly where he is. Remembering that warning, he’s not about to allow them to get close.

The scientist in him automatically tries to categorize the animals, but they frankly make very little sense in Earth terms. They’re about as large as medium-sized dogs, with an oblong body and six clawed legs. They have two large black eyes, and their faces—they don’t have a distinguishable head—are tipped by long tubular snouts, somewhat like anteaters. They’re covered in scales that glitter in red and gold, and in most contexts, he’d consider them beautiful.

They’re not beautiful when they’re swarming him.

Ford stands on the branch and shoots the first hraugn that approaches straight between the eyes. It falls down dead, but there’s already two more starting to climb the trunk, and more approaching quickly through the forest. He shoots the next one too, and the next, hoping that the rest will be discouraged by their dead comrades. To his dismay, they don’t even slow down.

Despite their size, they scuttle the vertical surface of the trunk like insects. He fires again, but there’s a crowd of them milling about now, and they’re not climbing towards him in a single file. Some of the creatures are approaching on the left side of the branch, and Ford can’t aim his gun in two directions at once, but he kicks the first one that comes near his foot. It falls, less dead than the ones he shot, but at least stunned. Not that it helps, because there are two more taking its place by his feet—he kicks again, then shoots the second one, but that means he’s lost track of the ones to his right, and at that moment he feels something touch his right arm.

They’re going around the trunk, too. Reflexively, he elbows the hraugn that’s approaching him from chest-height, then shoots it at point blank range, but at the same time there’s two of them crawling on his legs. He shoots one, and tries to kick the other, but they’re leaving some kind of sticky webbing behind that’s making his legs cling together, and it takes some force to rip free. He shoots the second hraugn too, but there’s more below it, and also behind him.

He’s struggling to hold them off, but they’re starting to run across his chest, too, and his arms are getting sticky with web, sleeves adhering to the front and side of the coat. He manages to pull his arms free, but it slows him down, and the swarm is already on top of him.

He’s not panicking—that’s not what this is—but he’s fighting for his life now, and there’s just too many of them. They’re not even using their claws—he’s not _hurt_ —but every time one of them leaves some sticky webbing on him it gets harder to move. Everything sticks to everything, except apparently to hraugn scales, because they’re moving unhindered, back and forth across him. He tries to fire another shot, but he can barely aim and it goes wild. Pulling the trigger again, the gun fizzles. Out of charge.

He’s not winning this fight.

They’re clearly intent on capturing him alive, but he knows too much about parasitoid Earth insects that lay their eggs in other species to think much of his survival chances if they have their way. He doesn’t want to die, but more, he doesn’t want to die _here_ , by a herd of mindless beasts, for no reason at all – but now he can’t even get his arms loose before they’re restrained again, tighter and tighter for every new layer of webbing. Eventually all he can do is snarl at them.

The hraugn work efficiently enough once he can no longer put up a fight, cutting him off from the trunk he’s been standing against, rolling him up in some more webbing for good measure, then carrying him down the tree and off through the forest on their backs.

He’s fully conscious, not even injured. Briefly, he considers screaming for help—but the chances of anyone being within earshot is minuscule, and the chances of that person being friendly is even smaller. Instead he keeps struggling, writhing and pulling against the web, rocking the hraugn that carry him from side to side. They don’t drop him.

He knows there’s a small pocketknife in his breast pocket; if he could only reach it, he may be able to do something, but it’s no use. Whatever these animals’ webs are made of, it’s obviously intended to completely incapacitate creatures of his size, maybe larger. He’s in a straightjacket, and that absurd thought almost makes him laugh. It’s better than crying.

Their goal is a structure the size of a three- or four-story building, somewhat like a termite hill. There are more hraugn scurrying around everywhere, on and around the structure, in and out of the numerous holes that goes into it. Faelta did mention hives, and this is most certainly a hive.

Ford is taken inside through a claustrophobically narrow tunnel, sloping vaguely downwards, twisting and turning and passing several random-seeming intersections. He expected pitch darkness, but as it turns out, there’s some kind of bioluminescent green algae growing on some of the tunnel walls, giving him at least a minimum of sight. He realizes he’s lost his glasses at some point during the struggle, not that they would actually help much in here.

A part of Ford—the same part that finds the glittering creatures beautiful—is _fascinated_. He wonders how this hive would compare to the smaller counterparts of Earth termites or ants, and if there’s a symbiotic relationship where the algae give the hraugn light in exchange for a place to grow undisturbed. But the fascination is covered by a thick film of dread, and most of his mind is focused on trying to memorize the route so that he can find his way out if— _when_ —he gets the opportunity. It’s a dimly lit maze, and he’s not sure if he’s successful in making any sense out of it.

Eventually the hraugn that carry him reach a larger space. Ford could have walked upright here, perhaps even unable to reach the ceiling with his hands, and it’s wide enough to feel more like a cave than a tunnel. Across the room are several thick white ropes suspended horizontally, connected by a few vertical ones at irregular intervals into a very loose net.

A small shiver runs down his spine when he realizes there’s— _something_ —tied to those ropes. In the semi-darkness, he’d say it looks like some kind of deer. An indigenous endothermic animal, surely.

They stop right in front of the net, though there are other hraugn—some of them much larger than his captors—freely passing through between its ropes. There’s a strong barnyard smell here, combined with something weirdly sweet that seems to be coming from further in. The deer makes a low, almost groaning sound when they come close. It’s obviously still alive, but Ford can’t make out what state it’s in.

There’s no need to panic. Whatever exactly they’re doing to the animal, they’re not used to doing it to creatures with intelligence. There’s still going to be chances to escape if he keeps his wits about him.

Ford is dropped to the ground, and the hraugn that carried him scurry off. A much larger hraugn—he suspects the hive inhabitants are physically distinguished by function, much like social insects—greets him by running its cold snout over his face. It seems to have an opening—a mouth?—on the tip where a thin tongue or other sensory organ emerges to get some kind of reading on him.

It finds his lips and immediately pushes its snout into his mouth.

Ford shudders violently, somehow not prepared for it even though he should have been. The appendage is dry and scaly and uncomfortably large, and Ford bites on instinct, grinding his teeth against the intrusion—but it’s too hard to tear, too supple to break. The creature hardly seems to notice, and of course, he’d hardly be the first animal to think of biting something that pushes unexpectedly into their mouth.

The tip is dancing on the back of Ford’s tongue for a moment before it spews out a sickly-sweet liquid into his mouth.

He gags, instinct being on the same side as reason as he fights to expel the fluid without swallowing—but the hraugn is blocking most of his mouth. He manages to push some of it out, dripping from the corners of his mouth and running down his face, and it’s sticky and quite disgusting, but better than the alternative. The hraugn is undeterred and pushes deeper until it almost touches his larynx, then spills more of the liquid almost directly down his throat.

He gags again, harder, but there’s too much monster snout in his mouth and the fluid goes down, his body swallowing out of misguided self-preservation. Ford instantly hates himself, but it’s too late. His tongue is tingling when the animal pulls its snout out.

He doesn’t know what the fluid is supposed to do to him. It’s possible that the alleged eggs are microscopic, and that was it. More likely, it’s some kind of biological paralyzing agent, which would explain why the captured deer isn’t moving at all.

He has to do _something_. He tries rolling—not a very dignified plan, but better lying still and taking it. It does work for a bit, moving away from the loose net and towards one of the walls. Or it _would_ work, except that every time he rolls takes exponentially more effort than the time before it.

Soon enough, he barely has the strength to lift his head from the ground.

He’s not completely paralyzed, or even anaesthetized. His mind’s still clear, and he can still feel every part of his body, but somehow—every ounce of strength is gone. He tries to stay calm, but he can feel his heart trying to beat its way out of his chest.

How can he fight if he can’t move _at all_?

The large hraugn is joined by a second one, both fondling his face with their snouts again, apparently determining that he’s ready. Ford wants to curse them out, but his mouth doesn’t work right, and all he gets out is an inarticulate sound.

They proceed to cut the webbing off him with their claws. Not just the webbing, in fact—the beasts cut through his clothes as well, and some of his skin. The sting tells him he’s definitely not anaesthetized. When they’re done he’s in rags and covered in small, bleeding cuts, but no longer physically restrained.

The small knife he was carrying has fallen out of his pocket and is lying right there in front of him.

Ford focuses on his hand. He’s not _completely_ paralyzed. He _can_ use it.

Spread fingers. Push arm forward. More. A little more.

He groans in frustration as the hraugn unceremoniously hoist him up by his shoulders with their front limbs, dragging him away and making the whole effort moot. He’s placed with his back against the loose net some four or five feet from the deer, half upright but heavily tilted to the left. The ropes making up the net turn out to be just as sticky as the webbing, if not more. They cling to his bare skin and hold his entire body weight up, at least for the moment. A couple of the smaller worker hraugn climb him and wrap some extra webbing to tie him to the horizontal ropes by his arms and legs, and to the vertical rope behind his back.

He’s hanging like a piece of dead meat, practically naked. There are pieces of cloth dangling around his ankles and wrists, but other than that, it’s all fallen away. The creatures did a good job stripping him, whether they meant to or not.

He blinks, because that’s about as much of a struggle as his body is up to. That, and wriggling his fingers a little. It’s useless. _He’s_ useless.

He knows what’s going to happen, and it’s getting hard to breathe, terror constricting his chest.

One of the creatures start feeling around on his body with its snout. It’s like it’s examining him, or looking for something. He’s not sure what it’s after, but then again, he doesn’t know how these things deposit their eggs. For once he’d give anything not to have to find out. It quickly dips its snout in between his lips again, then goes on to touch his armpits, his nipples, his ribs, his navel. It pushes around his hanging penis and scrotum a few times, and Ford shudders weakly, though that kind of humiliation is the least of his problems.

Finally it goes through the net between his legs and pushes its snout in between his buttocks. It stops when it finds his anus.

Ford gasps, realization sharp as a punch to his guts. _No. No way no._

It starts grouting into him, like a pig digging into hard mud. He shouldn’t be surprised. It wants a hole. He can’t move and these alien animals are going to—

The creature’s snout forces Ford’s anus open and pushes itself inside.

He’d scream if he had the energy, but all that emerges is a voiced whine. It hurts. The beast tearing itself through his dry sphincter feels like being cut open with knives, and the wrongness of the penetration overwhelms and almost paralyzes him on its own. He’s not supposed to open up like that. Things are not supposed to go in that direction.

Something is moving around and sniffing and touching his insides, and he can’t stop it. 

He can feel his rectum filling with cool fluid, much like his mouth had earlier. The hraugn can’t make him swallow through his ass, but it seems to be trying. It keeps its snout inside him, blocking the hole but keeping it painfully stretched, until most of the fluid has been absorbed. None of it drips out when it pulls away.

Ford tries to keep breathing, tries not to tremble. That wasn’t eggs, either. He’s not sure what it was, but his rectum stings. He tries to form a fist but only manages to bend his fingers halfway.

A sudden spasm goes through him. The next moment his guts start to churn violently, and he barely has time to steel himself before a spike of agony pierces his abdomen, every muscle convulsing, and a spray of liquid shit leaves him. He’s panting, eyes wide open, disbelief warring with sheer horror.

His guts churn again, spasm again, and expulse. Excruciating pain come in waves, leaving him nauseated and disoriented in between, and he might actually be screaming, but it’s hard to hear himself through the cramps and convulsions.

It’s as if his intestines are trying to unravel and force themselves out his ass, and he has no control of his body whatsoever. The filth comes out in spurts as everything inside him clenches uncontrollably, until he’s emptier than he’s ever been, and it still doesn’t stop. Some of the filth is running down the inside of his leg, and he can’t even wipe it off.

At least there’s no one here to witness this. It’s a bitter comfort.

Eventually his abdomen is spasming around nothing, his raw asshole opening and closing on thin air and unable to expunge anything because there is nothing else inside him. The convulsions last a little bit longer.

There are tears on Ford’s cheeks when he finally recovers enough to register such things, but he can’t remember crying.

A hraugn’s snout is inserted into his anus again, but it barely hurts, not compared to the storm inside him a minute ago. It spews more fluids inside him, and for a moment he thinks it’s more of the same, but it can’t be, there’s nothing _left_ —

He shivers as the hraugn waits for it to be absorbed by his intestine, then pulls out. Rather than stinging, it’s almost soothing this time. Breathing deep, shuddering breaths, he feels almost lightheaded from relief when there are no more spasms.

He needs to gather his thoughts, understand what happened. Not understanding makes it worse. It’s not that hard to grasp. The creatures purged him. They don’t want to put their eggs in his leftover shit, so they made sure he was all emptied out. It only makes sense.

There’s an even larger hraugn emerging from a side passage somewhere, less scuttering like the dog-sized ones and more waddling towards Ford. He’d say it’s about six feet in length. Most likely a queen, or something equivalent. That’d mean he’s considered ready to take those eggs now.

Something inside Ford snaps, giving him a boost of terrified strength. Somehow he manages to pull his arms hard enough that the ropes he’s tied to shake, rocking him back and forth. It’s not nearly enough and it doesn’t _do_ anything, and then he’s spent, breathing heavily and trying not to despair as the huge hraugn passes through an opening in the net. He can feel its scales against his buttocks.

He hisses, but the organ that penetrates him is smaller than he expected. What’s pushed through his anus can’t be wider than a finger, certainly smaller than the snouts, and the intrusion itself doesn’t hurt much at all. However, it doesn’t stop pushing, but keeps extending further and further, pushing inch after inch of ovipositor tube through his hole, grating against his raw entrance. It’s at least several feet long, and it’s going right into his guts. He thinks he can feel it twisting through his large intestine, lightly scratching the walls inside him as it fumbles its way deeper and deeper.

He’s trembling. He can see a glimpse of his co-prisoner, the deer, in the corner of his eye, and he wonders how much pain it is in right now.

When the ovipositor stops extending into him, it starts pulsating instead. He feels it when it passes through his sphincter, ripples of small undulations that has to indicate eggs being passed through. He makes a half-hearted attempt to count them, but the feeling isn’t precise enough.

Besides. It keeps going for a long time.

He’s taken by a fantasy of moving his legs, kicking the hraugn off him and pulling its appendage out, but his best attempt only makes his left leg twitch slightly. He’s fully conscious and alive and he can feel a heavy ache as the eggs accumulate inside his guts and he’s _helpless_.

He’s starting to feel bloated and sore. The eggs lie like a bruise somewhere deep inside him. At certain points, the pain spikes and it feels like things inside his abdomen are being rearranged, pressed against each other in unnatural ways. He can’t pinpoint the exactly location of the pain, but it keeps growing, and what he _can_ tell is that the hraugn is very slowly retracting its ovipositor through his anus as it keeps laying. That means it’s moving its point of dispatching the eggs as his insides are being filled up with them bit by bit.

His best hypothesis—and he does want to make those, because being helpless _and_ confused is even worse than just being helpless—is that his large intestine is being filled from the top down, packed tighter than is comfortable or natural. It makes his intestine swell and harden and take up space in ways that disturbs everything else in there, and that’s what’s causing the pain. He doesn’t think there’s anything actually bursting—that would be a much sharper agony than this—but it still hurts, and the unnaturalness of it all doesn’t help against the involuntary shivers.

It takes an eternity, or perhaps an hour, slowly transforming Ford’s abdomen into a swollen, throbbing internal bruise. He tries to keep his breathing calm, if only because he has no control over anything else as the eggs of an alien animal are crammed inside his guts.

He wishes it would hurry up. Get it over with.

He notices the moment when the ovipositor reaches his rectum, if only because that’s a part that is sometimes full of natural human waste, and the sensation is similar except it keeps filling him to the verge of tearing, and even the reflex to expulse seems to be numbed after the purge. Perhaps it’s the result of the second fluid he was given. That makes sense, too. Even when he barely has any control of his muscles, it prevents him from reflexively expelling anything. These creatures are efficient, well adapted to what they’re doing, and he no longer finds them fascinating at all.

Some of the final eggs press hard up against that one nerve cluster close to the anus that he knows to identify as the prostate, and Ford’s breath hitches. It doesn’t do anything but press against it, but the pressure is even and unavoidable, and the discomfort is palpable on top of the bloated soreness that his whole abdomen seems to have morphed into. The desire to squirm, just a tiny bit to get it to settle better, is overwhelming, but he can’t. It’s like an itch he can’t scratch on top of a stomach full of pain.

Ford is breathing heavily as the hraugn queen finally pulls the ovipositor out. It’s fine. It’s fine, he’s in pain and utterly uncomfortable and violated and he’s about to suffer until he dies horribly, but it’s fine.

It’s not fine.

His guts are swollen and wrong and sore and absolutely disgusting and it’s not fine at all. He’s helpless.

A sob emerges from his throat, but he fights to stop it from turning into more. He can’t fall to pieces. He can’t.

The hraugn queen emerges on the side of him that he can see, but he’s in no condition to care. It’s not like it can put any more eggs in him. He’s filled, there’s no room. He can feel the eggs as a heavy pain in his guts for every breath he takes.

Smaller hraugn are scurrying around below him. One of the mid-sized ones climbs his front and pushes its snout into his mouth again, and he wants to resist, but his tongue barely obeys him. The fluid it releases into his mouth is a new one, more bitter, but he swallows it nonetheless, vaguely hating himself.

It takes no more than a few seconds after the creature climbs off him before his stomach churns. He has just enough time to understand what’s about to happen and try to deny it before it’s the upper part of his body that goes into violent spasms.

He heaves. The content of his stomach spills from his mouth, mostly the remains of the local fried dough he had for breakfast. It can only mean one thing, and _of course_ it does. He heaves again, feeling his muscles cramp and convulse, and it’s different muscles this time, a different part of him being violated.

Stomach acid and whatever small remains of other things that are left in his stomach well through his throat, burning it raw, and he keeps heaving. He gasps for air while hulking and retching until there’s absolutely nothing more coming up, not even slime.

It feels like he’s dying, and he wishes he was.

The heaving stops, and he’s still hanging in the net, still breathing. He feels like he’s been twisted and wrung out like a rag. The bloated pain in his guts is still there, intensified by the violent movements, but now he can’t move at all, not even to spit out the foul taste from his mouth. His throat feels like a massive acid burn, and his stomach is achingly empty.

Another purge, and he can feel his shoulders shaking with hiccupping sobs, harder to suppress this time.

It doesn’t take long before a hraugn climbs him and pushes its snout into his mouth again. He can’t prevent it, and this time it spits something cool, almost minty, and soothing. The new liquid washes away most of the foulness from his mouth, then eases the pain in his throat when it goes down. The relief is so palpable that he closes his eyes, trying to relish it.

A second hraugn of the same size pushes the first aside and gives Ford finds another dose of the first liquid, the sickly-sweet one. It’s the drug that will keep him incapacitated, and this time he makes a frantic attempt to resist. Pushing the back of his tongue against the esophagus to keep it closed, he succeeds for a short while, but the creature forces his head backwards and there’s no way to spit it out, there’s no strength in his tongue. When the hraugn pushes at his tongue with its snout, the fluid slips down his throat despite everything. There’s more of it flushed into his mouth, and he has to swallow again, and again, no less than four times. All thoughts of relief are gone.

It finally leaves and scuttles off somewhere, but that only means the queen is going to come back.

He’s disgusted. He’s disgusting.

He tries again to clench his fists, and his fingers move towards his palms, but he can’t make them close. He wiggles his toes slightly, too. Control. He has _that_ much control.

It takes at least a few minutes, maybe more, before the hraugn queen approaches him again. He’s still not even used to the ache of the eggs in his guts even though he knows he’s about to take more.

The queen raises itself on its two hind legs and holds itself up against the ropes, its underside an inch from Ford’s face. He’s unsurprised when a few of the creature’s scales slide apart so that a pliable tube, about as wide as a finger, can emerge. It goes for his mouth, and he’s too weak to keep it out.

The tube has barely landed on his tongue before it pops a firm, rubbery sphere out in his mouth, perhaps prematurely. It’s about the size of a marble, and a new wave of revulsion makes him shudder. He wants to spit the egg out, or bite it apart, but the ovipositor is in the way and he has no power in his muscles.

The tube is cool and much thinner and smoother than the hraugn’s snouts have been, but tastes stale and salty. Assuming this is the same queen that just laid in his guts—and he thinks it is—he’s tasting his own ass right now, and that realization makes another wave of revulsion run through him. It extends to the back of his mouth, then bends slightly to push down into his esophagus.

Ford expects to gag when it goes into his throat, but there’s no gag reflex. Of course not. After making him throw up all the normal contents of his stomach, they wouldn’t want him to throw up _their_ contents. His nether region reflexes seem to be suppressed too, after all.

He suspects his whole digestive system is out of commission. It’s all extremely efficient. Despite the disconcerting lack of nausea, Ford’s skin is crawling.

He can feel the tube going down with a strange sort of physical discomfort. It reaches his stomach with no effort and seems to stop there, pulsating lightly on his tongue as eggs are pushed through.

Somehow it’s even worse to go through this a second time. Ford tries to breathe steadily through his nose, because hyperventilating isn’t going to _help_ , but he’s—

There’s an alien animal laying eggs inside his stomach. His guts are already full. He’s going to die, slowly, painfully and pointlessly. Some would say those are sufficient reasons to fall to pieces, but he still tries not to. He’s still a human being, and the least he can to is to pretend to still have some dignity. He pulls his hands into as close an approximation of fists as he can manage and endures.

Egg after egg. Rippling through the ovipositor and settling inside him. He tries to count seconds to keep his mind occupied, but finally loses count at some point around twenty-five minutes. His stomach aches dully as the eggs fill it, solid and undigestible, and soon after losing track of the minutes he realizes that they’re actually _filling_ it. He feels _full_ , as if he’s eaten a large meal, except there’s none of the pleasant doziness such a meal provokes.

The dull ache turns sharper as more and more eggs are placed. This takes an eternity, too. His stomach is stretching to accommodate them, growing, swelling, pressing against the rest of his insides. He’s aware that the human stomach is highly elastic, and the hraugn is taking every advantage of that. It’s less like he’s eaten a large meal and more like he’s over-eaten to the point of pain, to the point where he he’ll never want to see food again.

Fitting, since he doesn’t think he will.

He’s trembling violently—from pain, from having his body so violated, from coursing with adrenalin without being able to act—by the time the ovipositor finally starts to shrink back. He wishes he could vomit again. As horrible as that was, he’d prefer it to this feeling of unnatural fullness.

The pain spreads upwards as the ovipositor pulls out, and it takes a moment for him to realize that it’s still laying eggs. In his esophagus, inside his _throat_ , and there’s still no gag reflex, just the grating soreness of things being where they shouldn’t be. The hraugn doesn’t stop laying until it almost reaches his mouth, and once there it feels around a bit for stray eggs, pushing that first one down his throat with the rest. Only then does it go away.

It’s over, for now.

He wants to say it’s not so bad, but it _is_. Even without nausea, his body is telling him in no uncertain terms that these things shouldn’t be inside him. His throat hurts like he’s swallowing a large pill the wrong way, except multiplied by every egg that sits there, and there’s no way to either wash them down or throw them up. His swollen stomach aches as if he’s been stuffing himself on gravel; it’s viciously expanded, pressing against everything, and the pain shifts for every breath he takes. The eggs in his swollen guts sit like a weight in his whole abdomen, making everything ache, reminding him that he’s filled. His insides are one big bloated soreness.

He can’t stop trembling.

The hraugn pay him no more heed. Ford tries to relax, tries to pretend he’s comfortable, but he can’t. The eggs take up too much of his body not to take up his mind, too.

He wonders how long it will take for them to hatch. Hours, or days, or weeks? There’s no way to know, nothing to base an educated guess on. He hates not knowing.

He wonders what will happen when they do. There’s so many of them, but each is tiny compared to the host creature’s body. Most likely they’ll eat him, thousands of tiny larvae devouring him from the inside, but he has no frame of reference for how long it would take for that to kill him. If he’s lucky, the shock might be numbing, but nothing about this experience has been numbing so far.

He tries—he really does try—to resign himself to this. All he can do is wait, then die. He can’t see any way out, not when he’s semi-paralyzed and the eggs are inside him, but—

He _can’t_ accept it, and the resistance just makes the trembling worse.

He has no friends here. No one is going to raid a hraugn hive to save him. The veum back in Arbel might pity him, but no more.

The hraugn scurry around below him, glittering scales hazy in the distance and clearer immediately around the ropes he’s hanging from. Most of them are the medium-dog-sized workers. Sometimes a larger one passes by, and every time they come close Ford wills it not to stop and do anything more to him. They don’t. The queen has moved on to somewhere else, too.

He wonders how many eggs are inside him. It’s a small mathematical problem that manages to occupy his mind for a few minutes. A human stomach has been known to expand to hold a maximum of four liters. He calculates a human large intestine to hold something similar, roughly 4,3 liters. Maybe a bit more on both ends, because he’s filled to the verge of bursting. Assuming the eggs are the size of half-inch marbles, which each have a volume of about one ml, and subtracting up to one fourth for the spaces between them—less depending on how elastic they are—he ends up with somewhere between 6500 and 7000 eggs.

Knowing that doesn’t help him, but at least it’s knowing _something_.

He needs to keep occupying his mind. If he can’t forget the pain and dread, maybe he can wrap it up in mathematics. He makes an estimate of the size of this room. Counts how many hraugn are in here at any one time, then calculates how many would fit if they crowded together. Makes a rough estimate of the size of the hive, assuming there’s as much underground as he saw above ground. The speed of a running hraugn. How much electricity it could generate on a treadmill. It goes more nonsensical the more desperate he becomes, but it never completely blocks out the reality of his situation.

That old garage band Fiddleford played in in college. They could have fitted in this room, too.

He remembers one of their songs. Softly, almost without meaning to, he starts to hum.

Even humming feels strange and uncomfortable with alien eggs in his esophagus, but he still does it. The melody might be out of tune, and filled with strange pits and stops when his weakened muscles just aren’t up to it, but no one’s listening anyway. The hraugn don’t care, and he doubts the deer does either.

It still hurts. He thinks of another song, and another. Pop songs from the seventies. The earworms everyone listened to in high school. His father’s old vinyl records, the songs his mother used to sing at night, those weird tunes that Stanley and himself sometimes caught on to and would sing at every opportunity when they were kids.

There are tears running freely from his eyes now, but he can’t bring himself to care anymore. Eventually exhaustion takes him, and he drifts off to fitful sleep.

He wakes up sore and swollen, and also thirsty, but for a moment he can’t remember where he is. He’d been camping out in those badlands near that empire that has a name he can’t pronounce. No, wait, he’d found a shifting-point and ended up in that Arbel town. But this isn’t—

_Oh_.

For some reason he has an urge to laugh, but he doesn’t have enough strength.

He hangs there, unmoving but still alive. His mind drifts.

He thinks about Bill. What would his old muse think if he could see him like this? Would he enjoy that Ford had been brought so low? Would he be disappointed that he himself wouldn’t be the one to bring him to a torturous death? Perhaps he wouldn’t even care. Ford has already served his purpose as Bill’s pawn, and falling through the portal put an end to his usefulness years ago. Perhaps Bill doesn’t even think of him these days. Ford likes to believe that the bounties on his head mean that Bill at least considers him a threat, but he doesn’t feel like much of a threat to anything now.

He wishes he’d faced the bounty hunters instead of trying to hide in the forest. Best case scenario, he’d have been killed—quick and final. Or they might have taken him alive, too, but it wouldn’t have been like _this_ , paralyzed and helpless and aching heavily with alien eggs filling his body. There would have been people there. Someone to scream defiance to.

He wishes he could have been able to spit Bill in the eye before he died.

He wishes he could have been able to do anything at all.

Anything would be better than hanging here and _waiting_.

The thirst grows worse. His mouth is bone dry, and the eggs in his throat sit like jagged rocks in a desert. His stomach is still as painfully expanded as it was, but he hasn’t eaten, and certainly not had any water. The notion that he might die from dehydration before the eggs hatch feels strangely hopeful.

He thinks about Stanley. He’s tried not to dwell much on his brother for the past few years—that relationship is too raw, too fraught with conflicting emotions, and he’d known almost from the start that he’ll never see him again. That he’ll never see anything on Earth again. And yet, sometimes he can still feel that fateful shove, relive his own panic when the portal’s anti-gravity takes hold of him, see the look of utter horror on Stan’s face when he realizes what he’d done. And before that, Stanley’s scream when Ford had kicked him into that red-hot grate.

It had all seemed like fate, afterwards, like something that had to happen as a part of a heroic narrative. But the narrative is broken and all that is left is a meaningless life pointed to a meaningless death.

He wonders what Stan did after Ford disappeared. What he’s doing now. What Ford would say to him, if he could somehow send him a message. Try to explain himself? Apologize? It was good, once, to have someone always at his side, someone having his back. He wonders what his life would have been like if they’d never drifted apart—Ford with his dreams of collage and science and Stan with his impulsive overreaction that ruined everything—and never lost each other. He’d tell him he’s missed him.

At some point a hraugn climbs on him again and pushes its snout into his parched mouth. Despite knowing that dehydration would be a better death than being eaten alive by the hatchlings, his body welcomes the liquid, swallowing eagerly, feeling it run down between the eggs inside him. It doesn’t ease any of the pain, but it makes him feel shamefully better. A sweet aftertaste lingers in his mouth.

It’s impossible to judge the passage of time in this place. The faint light in the hive never changes, and the ebb and flow of its inhabitants seem random and irregular.

He gets thirsty again. The thirst grows, until he’s finally given fluids that keep him alive for a while longer. The cycle happens again and again, but he’s not sure the intervals are of the same length—and even if they are, they’re long enough that he loses track of how many times it has happened after the first few.

He tries to keep his mind occupied, but it seems to take longer to think a thought to its end. He’s growing lethargic, as if his mind is losing its strength, just as his body has. He’s probably not doing very well, physically or mentally. It doesn’t feel like it matters anymore.

The bloated soreness inside him doesn’t get any less painful, but it gets easier to bear the more time passes. He’s adapting, the sensation going from horrifyingly violating to just a chronic ache.

At some point he realizes that he has succeeded in resigning himself to this. He spends most of his time dozing. That hurts less than being awake.

The deer is gone. He missed what happened to it, being unawake when its eggs hatched and the hraugn workers removed the used host. That seems like a shame, but it’s not like witnessing it would have made any difference, anyway.

He still hums a song sometimes. It makes him remember what he is.

He’s vaguely aware that a couple of the larger hraugn are rubbing their snouts on the floor below him, creating a shallow pool of liquid. That’s strange—they never did that before. Raising his eyes slightly, he notices faint reflections of light in a wet trail that goes off into a nearby tunnel. The passing hraugn avoid stepping on it. Huh.

He closes his eyes again, but that’s when he feels a strange itch on the inside of his anus. It’s new and uncomfortable, enough to jolt him more awake than he’s been in a while. It still takes a couple of seconds for his addled mind to process what the new sensation means.

There’s something wriggling inside him.

He’d thought he’d be too numb to feel horror anymore, but somehow it floods him again. The wriggling isn’t just against the sensitive tissue nearest his opening—he feels more and more of it for every passing second, all throughout his abdomen. Things are _stirring_.

His cultivated resignation is cracking at the seams. His body refuses to accept this, refuses to accept that this is _it_ , and he’s already hyperventilating, straining weakly against the ropes he’s tied to. His insides are squirming, pushing and stretching him in ways the stationary eggs didn’t, changing the chronic pain into something acute again.

Ford believed he could numb himself to this, but he can’t, it won’t work. He’s still too alive, despite everything.

He makes a sound like a strangled cry when he feels the wriggling start up in his throat.

As if on cue, his entire body constricts, as if trying to shrink, as if trying to squeeze himself down into a singularity of raw pain. He can’t breathe, can’t think. His mouth and his anus alike open wide and fill with squirming inch-long hatchlings, pushed from inside him with agonizing force and falling from him in droves into the shallow pool prepared below. He can only vaguely feel them on his lips through the excruciating pain that envelops him from chest to ass.

It’s as if he’s purging again, but it doesn’t come in waves this time. It’s a continuous filter of agony, and at first he’s still convinced it’s because they’re eating him from the inside—he’s literally being torn apart—but there is some discordant part of him insisting that this agony has nothing to do with inner bleeding. This is atrophied muscles clenching and contracting and forcibly holding a strained position but it _hurts_ and he doesn’t have the presence of mind to know what it means.

Masses of them are falling away, but they’re all being pushed to his holes, crowding his throat and his mouth and his rectum and he needs air, but the pressure of their bodies constrict his airpipe. Everything is agony and his body keeps up the pressure as if it’s been tied into knots, squeezed tight like a wet cloth. He can’t scream, but he wants to.

The flow slows to a trickle, and he can breathe again, gasping desperately for oxygen around the small creatures squirming in his dry mouth. He manages to get a couple of lungfuls before he violently hulks, heaving with a restored gag reflex and pushing more of them up from his stomach. His intestines are churning painfully and his anus is an open passageway; it feels like it will never close again.

He blinks away tears, then heaves again.

The newly hatched creatures falling from his mouth are silvery white where the adults are golden red. He’s not sure if they have eyes, or even legs, but they do have those same long snouts. They wriggle like maggots against his tongue, squirm inside his guts, and there’s still more of them coming.

But they’re going out, not in.

It starts to occur to him that he’s still alive. The eggs hatched, and the young didn’t feed on him at all. They used him as—as an incubator, but not as a nursery. It’s not what he expected, and he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with this information.

His body feels light. Empty. Worn. Cracked like a dry shell, but somehow still breathing. There are tiny hraugn crawling out of his mouth and anus, but the cramps have almost stopped, and he aches, but in different ways than before.

Finally the trickle ceases, too. He’s emptier than he’s ever been, shrunk like a dried husk. Organs that have been swollen for so long are scrunching into strange nothingness, rearranging his insides again, and it’s not comfortable, but it’s different, and there are no more eggs inside him. He feels tattered, threadbare like an old rag. He should probably be hungry, but his body doesn’t seem to know what signals to send, and neither does his mind.

He’d never considered this point, because he never thought he’d live to see it. He’s exhausted and it’s so hard to think clearly, but he’s alive.

Belatedly, he realizes that his hands have been tightly fisted while the cramps happened. Yes, he can move them that much. No, it doesn’t mean his old strength has returned, but it’s oddly novel. He flexes his fingers, watching the hraugn hatchlings crawl away along the prepared path of liquid, white spots disappearing in the distance of the darker tunnel.

He doesn’t want to ask what happens next. It’s so strange to be able to breathe without anything grating against his insides. He makes himself breathe deeply, feeling the emptiness inside, and it’s—it’s good.

But there are hraugn workers climbing the ropes around him, and before long he finds that they’re cutting him loose. Wrists first, then ankles, and when they cut the webbing around his middle he yelps and tries to use his arms to break his fall. It’s not entirely successful, but at least his face lands on his hands instead of breaking his nose against the ground. His head spins anyway from the sudden drop.

He doesn’t get a chance to try to get his bearings before the workers lift him on their backs, just like when he was carried in. He’s not physically restrained this time, but he’s too weak and disoriented to even consider struggling against them when they carry him away. Besides, he doesn’t wish to stay here.

He doesn’t remember the route in from last time, but the hraugn’s path seem to be sloping upwards this time, and there’s a strange hope rippling in his chest as the first glimpse of daylight stings his eyes. The air is fresh. There’s a breeze. The heat of the sun hits his bare skin, and he sobs involuntarily.

The hraugn put him down on the ground some dozen feet outside the hive, and leave him.

Ford lies there for a while, half expecting something else to happen, not daring to believe that they simply let him go.

Nothing happens. The hraugn go about their business around the hive, ignoring him.

It’s difficult to wrap his mind around it after despairing for so long, but he’s still alive. He’s served his purpose for the hraugn hive, and they haven’t killed him.

The sun is hot on his naked back, and there’s a part of him that is still wrapped up in exhaustion and lethargy that just wants to close his eyes and go back to sleep. But he can’t do that, can he? Not if he wants to survive.

It starts to dawn on him that even though he’s alive, he’s in an exceedingly bad shape. The hraugn hardly brought him outside out of mercy. They brought him out because they’re herbivores and he’s not going to be of any more use to them, and they’d have done the exact same with his corpse if he’d already expired. It’s not like they’ve taken any measures to keep him alive past the hatching.

He doesn’t know how long he was in there, but he hasn’t had anything to eat during all that time. His mouth is parched again after the all the hatchlings passing through it, but he’s not going to be given any more water.

He hasn’t been able to _move_ during all that time. Rolling over on his back with effort, he raises a trembling forearm and watches his fingers slowly clench and unclench. He’s visibly lost muscle mass. He’s too weak to even try to stand, much less walk, even though he’s able to move more than early in the captivity. In fact, as he considers it, he’s not sure if the current weakness has anything to do with the drug he was given at all. He might have been given plain water the last few times, though it’s hard to tell the taste of a liquid when you’re dehydrated and half-unconscious. There’s be no need for the animals to waste resources if he’s already too weak from muscle atrophy and starvation.

In conclusion, he’s still screwed.

A wave of despair hits him—all the more crushing because it’s _new_ despair. The hraugn are done with him, but he’s weak as a baby, he has no water, no food, no shelter, not even clothes. There’s going to be predators. Scavengers. Even a small one could take a bite out of him and he wouldn’t be able to defend himself.

He clenches his fists and takes a deep breath, trying not to shudder.

It seems hopeless, but this time there’s nothing stopping him from fighting. Fate has handed him a chance, no matter how small, and he doesn’t _want_ to die. He’s going to survive. That’s what he does, that’s what he’s been doing ever since he left Earth.

Despite everything, there’s still a core of determination in him. He rolls over again and pushes himself up on his elbows, ignoring the way it makes his head spin. He can see the direction of the sun. This has to be near noon, and he can approximate the direction of the town from that.

He manages to get up on hands and knees, falls over once and tries again. He can do this. He’s not going to lie down and wait for death if he has a choice—and he does have a choice this time. He crawls, arms and legs straining with effort, bare knees scraping against the forest floor. He’s panting and trembling with exhaustion, but he’s moving forwards.

Perhaps he only needs to reach the road. Perhaps he can get there in a matter of hours. His arms fold beneath him and he has to push himself up again. He’s going to survive.

There’s something approaching. Heavy footsteps thundering against the ground—the ground which is against his ear. He must have fallen over again, but his limbs ache so badly and he needs to rest for just a bit.

But he needs to keep going, or he’s never going to reach the road, or the town. He can’t see the sun anymore. It’s darker than it was.

“Evet! Come here! I found him!”

“Is he—”

Something touches his head, and Ford manages to turn towards it. Everything is a blur, but he thinks there’s the lizard-like face of a veum standing over him.

“Thank high ones, he’s alive.”

“I told you they throw their hosts out before they die.”

“What?” Ford rasps weakly. It might be the first word he’s formed since before he was captured.

“It’s alright, Stanford. You’re safe now.”

He’s covered by a large piece of cloth, maybe a cape one of the veum was wearing. It’s large enough for him to drown in, and he pulls it closer with a trembling hand. He’s too far gone to be embarrassed about being naked, but it feels good against his skin. “Why?” he croaks.

“We were looking for you. We’re taking you back to town.”

He’s wrapped in the cloth and lifted by strong arms, and for once it seems alright to surrender to unconsciousness.

He later finds out that the people who saved his life was that young innkeeper, Faelta, and their partners Evet and Tiska.

At first he doesn’t even ask. For the first few hours of being brought back to the safety of the town, he doesn’t talk much. They help him into a bath, and only when he’s clean does he realize how much filth had accumulated on his body. They feed him hot soup that tastes like chicken, and only after eating does he realize how hungry he’d been. He sleeps on a bed, and he wakes rested.

His insides feel sore as his digestive system starts to function again, but it’s a good ache, telling him that he’s alive. The ache in his emaciated limbs are the same. It tells him that he’s starting to return to life.

It takes time to recover, eating and exercising carefully to rebuild his body, but his first assessment of Arbel as a relatively safe place holds. No more bounty hunters appear after the first ones were apparently convinced he was dead. In fact, there are no other aliens passing through as far as he can tell.

“How long was I in there?” he asks Evet on the second day. His voice is returning, and he needs to know this, if he’s ever going to be able to file this experience away into something that makes sense.

“Nineteen days,” Evet tells him. “People say that’s about normal for hraugn hatchlings, but sometimes it takes as long as twenty-one days, so we weren’t sure you were out yet. You’re lucky Tiska noticed your track.”

Nineteen days. Ford shudders and stores the information away.

Days later, he finally gathers the courage to demand the most pressing answer. “Why did you do it?”

“Mmh?” Tiska replies from the table where they’re busily cutting up vegetables.

Ford repeats the arm stretch he’d been doing, then stops. “I didn’t expect anyone to come for me.”

The veum makes a sympathetic hissing noise. “I’m sorry,” they say. “We wouldn’t have been able to get you out of a living hive, so this was the only way.”

“No, you misunderstand. I didn’t expect you to come at all, before or after.” He rubs the indented mark still left on his arm where he’d been hanging from the hraugn webbing. “I expected to die. And when it was all over, I thought the only chance I had for survival would be if I could make it to town on my own.” He looks down. “But I don’t think I would have, if you hadn’t been there.”

“Probably not.” Tiska makes a clicking sound of agreement. “I’m pretty impressed that you managed to get as far as you did in the shape you were in. Faelta was half convinced we were just tracking some carnivore dragging your body away.”

“But why— _why_ did you save me?”

Faelta has been three-legged squatting with their tail on the floor, trying to read some kind of notes, but looks up now. Their jaw skips from side to side in a way Ford has learned conveys a loss for words. “Why _wouldn’t_ we?” they decide to say.

Ford laughs weakly. “Because I’m a stranger? Because I’ve lost everything I owned and can’t pay you back? Are you going to turn me in for the bounty?” They’ve been so gentle and supportive that it seems unlikely, but that would at least be a reason.

Faelta huffs. “Bounty hunting is grotesque and unfitting for intelligent creatures.”

Tiska clicks agreement. “Besides, no power that has any authority over _us_ wants you. Why should we care if you did some alien crime on some alien world?”

Ford raises an eyebrow. “You might care about the money. Most people do.”

“Not to the point of collecting bounties, no.” Tiska sounds like this should be a foregone conclusion.

Faelta hisses slightly. “Even if you did do something deserving of punishment,” they say, “You’ve suffered more than enough already.”

Ford exhales softly. He’s not sure everyone would agree, but he’s grateful for the sentiment. That they’d go out of their way to save the life of a hunted drifter. Not everyone in the multiverse is cruel.

Eventually, he repays them as well as he can by sharing some technological ideas and some stories about Earth. When Ford’s conscience doesn’t allow him to stay any longer, he leaves with a full set of new clothes, a new pack, and full provisions.


End file.
